"From my perspective," he said, "it was nice weather. "Oswego's Once in Lifetime Snow 'Just Incredible'", A Lew Swenson photo, courtesy of the Onondaga Historical Association: South Salina Street, Syracuse, at the beginning of the Blizzard of 1966.Leonard Siegler has spent 55 years as a professional bus driver, traveling from "one end of the country to the other. The only thing that prevented that snowstorm from becoming a true blizzard like this infamous one of the very next weekend was the lack of high winds. The Blizzard of 1966 swept across most of the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains on January 29, 1966, and brought record low temperatures, high winds and heavy snowfall in its wake. "It's kind of like CNN now with reports from overseas," he said.

"By Jan. 31, the flakes were averaging one-half to three-quarters of an inch in size. The Blizzard of 1966 brought 13.8 inches of snow to Washington, but it was across much of central and western New York where weather history was made 50 years ago this weekend. "It was really the storm of the century," said Dan Bartholf, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Syracuse. The Blizzard of '66: January 29 to February 1 - 42.3 inches of snow fell in the Syracuse area, 102.4 in Oswego County. "We've had nothing else in this century of that magnitude. Others died from heart attacks while shoveling snow or pushing cars, or traffic accidents caused by slick roads. The daily snowfall totals for On January 22–23 of 1966, the city of Batavia and Genesee County had 2 feet (61 cm) of snow fall on that Saturday night alone. Food was dropped by parachute to residents stranded in rural areas.The storm cost the city of Syracuse an estimated $217,000, added an estimated 300 million gallons of water to the municipal water supply and cost local industries $5 million daily due to what one newspaper account described as "silent smokestacks. There were plenty of instances of heroism -- Vaughn recalls how city firefighters took a pregnant Mountainview Avenue woman to the hospital by pulling her on a toboggan -- but police were also had to investigate several instances of looting.Four Central New York residents died of exposure, including an 18-year-old Baldwinsville man who was found dead under a tree after he left his parents' house to visit a girlfriend. "Indeed, a quarter-century after that four-day storm blasted Central New York -- dumping 42.3 inches of snow on Syracuse and a staggering 102 inches on lakefront Oswego County -- residents and weather experts alike still speak of it in reverent tones.Henry Vaughn, the city's superintendent of street cleaning, was a young snowplow operator when the storm blew into town on Jan. 29, 1966. And when it was over on Feb. 1, more than 42 inches fell on Syracuse , a record that stood until 1993 . Snowfall totals … "But to Sykes -- who was the first director of the Lake Ontario Environmental Laboratory at SUCO -- the storm thoroughly justified his earlier career decision that Central New York would make an ideal place to study big-time snow. All rights reserved ( "I was out driving a plow on Euclid Avenue when I realized the telephone poles were on the wrong side of the street," said Vaughn, 57.His vision was so obstructed that he couldn't immediately recognize he was off the road and into a field.The storm inspired both the best and worst of human nature. "People were sick of hearing about it, but they couldn't not listen.

"Bartholf said Syracuse was caught up in a storm that engulfed the entire Northeast, triggered by a low pressure front along the East Coast. 2. There were several reports of babies born outside of hospitals. The snow, he said, barely tailed off until four days later. It was like taking a pillow and dumping it over the area for hours on end.

On Monday, January 31, federal government employees in Washington were excused from reporting to work A total of 103 inches (260 cm) of snow was recorded at Oswego, 50 inches (130 cm) of this falling on the last day of the storm alone.The storm lasted from January 27 to January 31, 1966, a total of 4½ days. "I was driving (a bus) into Fayetteville, we were crawling, and we went over a bridge where there was so much snow you didn't know you were on it," said Siegler, 72, a city resident who still drives part time for Syracuse and Oswego Motor Lines Inc. "There were times the snow in the road covered up my headlights. The heavy snow -- accompanied by wind gusts climbing to 58 mph -- began just two days after temperatures in Onondaga County dipped to a numbing 26 below zero.Siegler remembers he was transporting a busload of State University College at Oswego students from the New York City area to their home campus when the snow blew in.

""It culminated in an absolutely chaotic situation," said Robert Sykes, a retired Oswego State College earth science professor whose speciality is lake-effect snow. The Blizzard of 1966 left many in Syracuse and Central New York buried … Within days, at least 142 people had been killed — 31 had frozen to death, 46 died in fires that started while people were trying to heat their home. "The snow came down so hard and so fast that we couldn't get the trucks out of the lot," said Roland Allen, now a news editor at the Herald-Journal who was then editing copy for The Post-Standard.Dr. During his long career, Siegler never experienced another storm that rivaled in ferocity the Blizzard of 1966, which hit its blinding peak in Central New York 25 years ago today.


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